I am finally getting around to explaining how I built my digital pinhole camera. If you have ever made a pinhole camera, you recognize that there are major drawbacks to traditional pinhole photography. Fortunately, our hybrid digital pinhole camera isn’t limited by the traditional obstacles that make pinhole photography impractical. For example, with our digital pinhole camera, it is easy to get full color images. There isn’t any processing or light sensitive materials. There isn’t any fumbling around in the dark trying to load your camera. You can take as many photos as your memory card will allow, and best of all, you get instant results. Let’s get started…

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A couple weeks ago I described the technology burnout that led me to build a pinhole camera. Once I stripped away the extraneous gadgetry, I was left with a lightproof box with a hole in it. Until I build myself a darkroom, I won’t be able to test this simple machine. Or will I? My vacation from technology was nice, but back to technology I go. It is going to take digital camera technology to test my pinhole camera.

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I have been thinking about pinhole cameras since last week when I was describing the photography of Abelardo Morell to my creative director. If you are unfamiliar with Abelardo Morell, the link above will take you to a gallery of his work. What Morell is famous for is essentially turning entire rooms into cameras. By blocking out all the light in a room except for a small aperture on the window, the image outside the room is projected across the room. Morell, standing inside the “camera” used a long exposure to photograph the inside of the room with the outside projected upon the interior. With a little more research, I learned that what he was building is actually called a camera obscura, a tool that dates back to the 5th century BC. The reason I bring this up is partly because I took some heat a few posts back for criticizing Paula Scher, a technophobe, for endorsing the G5.

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